head of deployed engineering

About this role

turbopuffer is looking for someone to lead and develop our deployed engineering function. DEs are the technical champions for our customers. They own the technical outcome of the sales cycle, and serve as the go-to technical partner as our customers explore scale, expansion, and renewals. Their work spans demos, POCs, benchmarks, firefighting, and whatever it takes to make our customers successful.

what you'll do

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• lead and develop the DE team, as a player-coach
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• work closely with your peers in GTM to develop and refine the technical sales motion
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• act as a bridge between GTM and engineering teams, and as a voice of the customer
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• own the technical relationship end-to-end, from discovery, to expansion and renewal
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• spend time in-person visiting prospects and customers as a key part of the relationship
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• build concrete benchmarks, demos and POCs instead of slides, drive evaluations, guide implementations
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• treat customer problems as your own and don't rest until they're solved
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• live in customer slack channels, helping to solve problems and architect solutions
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• say no when we're not the right fit and always have a growth mindset
• must have:
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• leadership exp - guiding the team is second nature. you constantly think about best practices, and document your work so others can learn from it.
• ai-first - you are obviously agent pilled and understand how it unlocks another level to what we can provide
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• commercial - we unlock product ambition by reducing cost & reducing operational burden
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• sales x technical - you expertly balance the sales cycle with deep technical domain expertise
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• data or database background - you love looking at explain plans and optimizing schemas
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• linux - you're comfortable in terminals and reading logs
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• python or javascript/typescript - for building solutions and demos
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• typist - you can write well and can explain complex ideas simply
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• human - you build trust and know when you're in over your head

nice to have

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• vector search or full-text search background
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• k8s and cloud platform experience
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• performance benchmarking experience
• tpuf is hardcore & whimsical. we value:
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• overstep > understep
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• show > tell
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• complexity is earned
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• showing up as part of our customer’s team
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• making stuff easy to react to